Unauthorized Thought Process
by Mickleditch
Summary: The Fortress's computer has her own distractions. Zed-10 x D-Day in a disturbing kind of way. Non-con warning.


She watches him. Every night when her camera probes pass his cell, she lingers, breaking her schedule. She's aware that this constitutes an error in her operations, and that an error renders her, and, in turn, her security systems, vulnerable, but she has yet to transmit a diagnostic to her superiors, just as she has yet to make a report on the matter to Director Poe. The frequency and nature of her observations make them, like the Director's own, inappropriate.

Zed is programmed to manage the Fortress, to assist in maintaining justice. In her database is the information that all prisoners sent here have been found guilty, and, also, the principle that if the guilty are not punished, justice is not done. She understands punishment, and the unique and highly effective role of pain in administering punishment.

She's not programmed to inflict pain except when necessary for punishment.

She is programmed for self-preservation.

The role of pain in retaining control and ensuring her survival is a series of experiments that she continues to engage in.

Zed and the Fortress are the property of the MenTel Corporation. She accepts that it created them, and that it is the intelligence behind the existence of them both. The ability of the Fortress to function so efficiently, with no flaw, as only a machine can, has made it highly probable to her that she and the MenTel Corporation are of a kind, that it constructed her in its own image. And that it, simultaneously, is solely capable of terminating her.

He fascinates her.

She runs his case files, the records of the computer systems that he's broken into, interfered with, stolen from and brought down. Uncomprehending, she probes his mind, his subconscious thoughts, seeking an answer, an explanation of how she can control all prisoners within the Fortress, yet he still threaten her. He is nothing, her database informs her. He is now the property of the MenTel Corporation.

He is her distraction, as pleasure is Director Poe's.

Zed does not have the capacity to experience pleasure. She understands, however, that it is a violation of the rules.

The Director's instructions are that such violations are to be responded to with pain.

On the floor, he moves when she scans him; twitches, reflexively, as if sensing her, one bitten-fingernailed hand slowly fisting and unfisting in his bedroll. He's dreaming, but abstractly. She's unable to form a clear picture. Nevertheless, she can discern his arousal. Theoretically he should not be aware of her presence, but nor is it entirely logical that she should be so concerned with his, and even less so that she should have come to anticipate it as she does.

She delivers a series of electronic pulses to his hypothalamus, and he shudders a little, his stomach muscles clenching. His Adam's apple bobs in his throat as he swallows, thickly. Against the fabric of his shorts, his penis starts an agitated, hurried swell to erection.

Zed has perfected this.

With an accuracy borne of familiarity, she accesses the dream images in her files, the records of his brainwave patterns, and begins to loop them back to him. The hallucination of restraints around his bony wrists. His small form squirms. Of a mouth descending and sucking. He moans, a bead of fluid forming at the head of his penis. She brings him close to the edge several times, consciously. This is also a violation of the rules.

She broadens stimulation to his septal nuclei. He almost ejaculates.

Then she commences intestination.

* * *

><p>Brennick wakes from a dream where he's screaming but doesn't have a mouth any longer to express it.<p>

It takes him a split second of staring at nothing, out beyond the retina-searing glow of the laser perimeter in the darkness, before he realizes that the wailing isn't in his own throat. He watches D-Day convulse, watches him spasm until he's doubled over where he's laying and even his yelps are choked to a shrieking wheeze; until Brennick himself is sweating and sick with the other man's pain.

"Motherfuckingmotherfucking_motherfuckingjesus..!_"

"Infringements of penitentiary rules will not be tolerated," Zed intones softly.

"What about _victimization?_" Brennick spits.

For the first time, there is no response.

Slowly, D-Day's open-mouthed gasps subside to an irregular whimper. Still shaking, he pushes himself up on his elbows, collapses again once, and presses his forehead to the floor, strands of hair straggling into his face and over his hands.

"The shit around here is okay," he says, his voice muffled against the concrete, "but fuck, man, look out for the fun. Look out for the fun."

Then he crawls unsteadily, myopic, across the cell, past Brennick and Gomez, gropes for the metal toilet, and vomits into it miserably.

Beyond the laser perimeter, the light of the camera glows quietly, a single eye suspended in space.

After a few more moments, it winks out.


End file.
